"Developer evangelist" offended by developer, tweets outrage, both are fired.

An incident at the annual Python developer conference has led to allegations of sexism, death threats, the firings of two people, and—apparently—multiple DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks.

The strange saga began Sunday at the PyCon event in Santa Clara, CA, when Adria Richards, a developer evangelist for e-mail vendor SendGrid, overheard jokes being told by two developers sitting behind her during a session. The jokes were sexual in nature, she said. Richards proceeded to take a picture of the developers, then tweeted the photo and asked PyCon organizers to have a word with them.

The story ended with one of the developers getting fired, Richards getting fired, and an apparent denial of service attack against Richard's personal blog and against SendGrid. "Anonymous has reviewed the situation and rendered judgment using their collective wisdom and experience," wrote one anonymous poster in a manifesto. Could the story get any stranger?

Richards did not tell the developers that she was offended, saying in the comments on her blog post, "I didn't want to be heckled or have my experience denied." She initially decided to remain silent about the jokes, she wrote, until she saw up on the main stage a photo "of a little girl who had been in the Young Coders workshop." At that moment, "I realized I had to do something or she would never have the chance to learn and love programming because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible for her to do so," she wrote.

After tweeting the pictures of the developers, she then wrote on Twitter, "Can someone talk to these guys about their conduct? I'm in lightning talks, top right near stage, 10 rows back #pycon." She also linked to PyCon's code of conduct, which says in part that "offensive jokes are not appropriate for PyCon." On her blog, Richards concluded, "Yesterday the future of programming was on the line and I made myself heard."

PyCon staff quickly spoke to the developers, who apologized, but the staff took no further action. PyCon described its response in a blog post yesterday:

On Sunday March 17th an incident occurred involving some inappropriate comments made during a crowded plenary session. Per the stated guidelines for attendees and staff, the issue was reported to the PyCon 2013 staff and resolved privately.

Both parties were met with, in private. The comments that were made were in poor taste, and individuals involved agreed, apologized, and no further actions were taken by the staff of PyCon 2013. No individuals were removed from the conference, no sanctions were levied.

PyCon values the privacy of all attendees above everything. Except in cases wherein law enforcement must or could be involved, all reports and actions taken are kept confidential by PyCon staff.

After the incident, PyCon updated its "Attendee Procedure for Handling Harassment" to encourage conference attendees to report such behavior privately. "Public shaming can be counter-productive to building a strong community. PyCon does not condone nor participate in such actions out of respect," the updated PyCon procedures say.

One of the developers was also fired by his employer, PlayHaven, which said the inappropriate comments were contrary to the company's dedication to gender equality. PlayHaven makes a financial platform for monetizing mobile games.

“Forking” and firings

A person going under the Hacker News name "mr-hank" claimed that he was the developer who was fired. He apologized for the jokes but said Richards misinterpreted the "forking" statement. The developers were discussing the process of forking code bases, not making sexual jokes, he said. "While I did make a big dongle joke about a fictional piece [of] hardware that identified as male, no sexual jokes were made about forking," he wrote, adding:

She gave me no warning, she smiled while she snapped the pic and sealed my fate. Let this serve as a message to everyone, our actions and words, big or small, can have a serious impact. I will be at pycon 2014, I will joke and socialize with everyone but I will also be mindful of my audience, accidental or otherwise. Again, I apologize.

The other developer making jokes, Alex Reid, was not fired.

PlayHaven CEO Andy Yang acknowledged firing the developer, writing, "PlayHaven had an employee who was identified as making inappropriate comments at PyCon, and as a company that is dedicated to gender equality and values honorable behavior, we conducted a thorough investigation. The result of this investigation led to the unfortunate outcome of having to let this employee go. We value and protect the privacy of our employees, both past and present, and we will not comment on all the factors that contributed to our parting ways... We believe in the importance of discussing sensitive topics such as gender and conduct and we hope to move forward with a civil dialogue based on the facts."

Richards' own blog was subsequently hit by a DDoS attack. VentureBeat also reports that Richards has been the target of rape and death threats on Twitter, although such tweets have apparently been deleted by Twitter.

The SendGrid website has also been unresponsive much of the day. The company has not confirmed the cause, although it's assumed to be a DDoS attack. (Hacktivist group Anonymous is supposedly behind it.) "Our SMTP and Web servers are currently down," SendGrid wrote in a status update. A few hours later, the company provided some good news: "We're now accepting mail via SMTP & Web API. The Website is up, and we're working to finalize this resolution." Business customers have complained about the outage impacting their operations.

Today, SendGrid fired Richards. In a Facebook post, SendGrid wrote, "Effective immediately, SendGrid has terminated the employment of Adria Richards. While we generally are sensitive and confidential with respect to employee matters, the situation has taken on a public nature. We have taken action that we believe is in the overall best interests of SendGrid, its employees, and our customers."

A further post from SendGrid CEO Jim Franklin a few hours later expanded on the company's reasons for firing Richards. "SendGrid supports the right to report inappropriate behavior, whenever and wherever it occurs," Franklin wrote. "What we do not support was how she reported the conduct. Her decision to tweet the comments and photographs of the people who made the comments crossed the line. Publicly shaming the offenders—and bystanders—was not the appropriate way to handle the situation.

"A SendGrid developer evangelist’s responsibility is to build and strengthen our Developer Community across the globe. In light of the events over the last 48+ hours, it has become obvious that her actions have strongly divided the same community she was supposed to unite. As a result, she can no longer be effective in her role at SendGrid."

Update: The original version of this story said Adria Richards found out about her firing on Facebook and left a comment on her employer's page threatening a lawsuit. It now appears that comment was written by an impostor, and not by the real Adria Richards.

I agree with the first comment in this article. Confliction: the dudes were inappropriate, the dudette needed to chill. Not sure either person should have been fired. No reason for DDoS or rape/death threats.

And that's my subject to this post. What's the deal with random people raging against others and threatening rape and death? Do they have no life? Are they so hateful and negative in person?

Agreed. The rape threats are twisted, and the fact that they were made at all is sad, but almost expected unfortunately. And to those who have trouble understanding why women might feel estranged by sex jokes at a tech conference, consider that they have to deal with bullshit like this. Shout too loudly, and people won't just disagree with you, but threaten to rape you.

The DDoS stuff just puzzles/amuses me though. It's become such as standard response to *anything* on the internet, it's almost funny.

The company that fired the guy probably will get sued for firing him. They SHOULD have issued a statement defending their employee, and stood by him. Firing him will bite them in the ass much harder than defending him would have.

That's not how at-will employment works.

I'd doubt a San Francisco company has at-will employment.

I've never been employed in the bay area, though I've worked on both coasts (and in between). What's typical there?

I have no, I am just operating under the assumption that California has stronger employee protection laws than the American South.

I'm American and thought the same thing. This whole event is 100% culturally driven. People can't be imperfect humans anymore. Any mistake, no matter how minor, can lead to life nuking results because of the level of toxicity in all the competing subcultures. Like her tweet about racism someone posted above- pure mind cancer. It's rampant here, and it's metastasizing more and more aggressively.

Where are you located? EU by chance? How would this have gone down there?

I have a weird mixed reaction to this story. I'm feeling like (i) some people kinda need to learn how to act professionally at conferences and (ii) some other people kinda need to chill out.

I think it comes down to people need to chill out. Only.

They made jokes, like young guys do. They were not "sexist" in nature; they were not belittling any gender, and they were not directed at anybody. Further, it sounds like they were out of earshot of any children and the young, aspiring female-programmer mentioned... unlike Adria, whose Twitter joke could have had a much larger audience.

People make jokes about sex. Shocking. Sometimes, they even do it in public. As long as they aren't being obnoxious or ruining the innocence of a nearby child, I see no problem. To get offended at such a harmless joke is ridiculous, not to mention pretending you are suddenly on a crusade for women's rights in programming by passive-aggressively confronting a few jokers.

Unbelievable.

EDIT: I'm going to take this a step further. If the extent of the joke was saying the word "dongle" in a funny way along with a wink, you've got yourself playground humor at that point. That's literally the kind of crap you would expect elementary school boys to be saying around their friends (and elementary school girls). They'd use a less technical term for it, and any _sexual_ connotations would be nonexistant, but little boys do joke about this.

Newsflash: Elementary school kids know that penises exist. What a shocker. My head is about to explode from this ridiculous PC crap.

I guess I just fundamentally disagree.

I don't think the guy should have gotten fired. That's why I wrote "people kinda need to chill out" and not "someone kinda needs to chill out". But I do think his behavior was inappropriate for a professional setting. If I heard one of my subordinates make a joke like that at a conference, he'd know I was unhappy about it and he probably wouldn't get to go to the next couple conferences.

Is it me or is there a higher proportion of people who tend to be uptight in the US?

If I came across this situation I would either giggle inwardly and think what a typical idiot or roll my eyes.

If they kept it up and the noise was disturbing me I'd turn around and tell them to shut up, but I don't know anyone, even the most strongly feminist, religious or morally conservative who would embark on a campaign to publically humiliate someone for messing around in an overheard private conversation.

If the comments were made during a public speech or in a meeting or something like that they would probably complain to the organizers and then if nothing was done about it they might then take it public and complain but that would be a very extreme case.

Yes, Political Correctness in the U.S. is particularly out of control. This is the immaturity of our society. Hopefully it will improve with age.

One thing missing, and I think is key, is context of the dongle "joke". How loud was it? How crude was it? Was it just an offhand remark or snicker? Was it just one guy whispering to another? Was it a continual banter between the two men, or just a one off? We'll never get an accurate picture of that aspect, least of all from Adria herself. She had three perfectly acceptable ways of dealing with the situation:

1) Ignore it if it was a one time thing.2) Ask the men to be quiet, and that she was trying to listen to the presentation.3) Speak to the PyCon organizers and have them deal with it.

Her picture taking of the two jokers and then the public shaming was not just an overreaction, but it borders on invasion of privacy. What gives here the right to post pictures of strangers, and only those strangers, on a public forum, as well as talking about their behavior, without their consent? Had someone she'd never met posted a picture of her along with comments on Twitter or Facebook, I'm sure she'd have gone completely apeshit. Her behavior at PyCon, as well as some of her Tweets, show that she is "professional" only when it suits her needs.

Should the guys have been listening to the talk and not been joking around? Sure. Did this deserve to blow up into what it became? Absolutely not. The self-righteousness of the "I'm offended, therefore you must suffer" mentality that many have adopted is bound to get out of hand, as evidenced by something like this. I think people should have a reasonable expectation to not be offended by the actions of others, especially in situations like a public talk at a conference, but acting like a spoiled, thin-skinned, whiny child is not a preferable, nor mature, response to the situation.

I have a weird mixed reaction to this story. I'm feeling like (i) some people kinda need to learn how to act professionally at conferences and (ii) some other people kinda need to chill out.

And neither should have gotten fired.

Whatever people might think about Richards, this sets a grim precedent. If you do something on the internet, even if it's outside of work, then if people harrass you and your employers hard enough as a result, your company is going to throw you under the bus. Personally I've been threatened in this way in the past, and I've generally presumed that the company would stand by me in such a circumstance.

Skyhaven and SendGrid have both shown here that internet terrorism as a means of getting at individuals *works*, and that spells trouble for the future. Speaking one's mind on the web has just become a lot more high stakes.

The developer absolutely has grounds to sue Playhaven. He will probably get his job back, or at least get a settlement.

The firing of the developer over what seems to be a relatively slight error made my head spin. I don't know anything of him or this case, but I wonder if it's possible that there had been problems with him before and the company viewed this as a 'final straw' thing.

I find it a bit ironic that she had a 2009 campaign"Taking My Shirt Off for Software"Her Flickr SetImplying a bit of sexual innuendo? Personally I like her but nerds will be nerds!

you realise she was faking it ? (see the set, it IS SFW)

"faking" in what sense? She takes off her shirt. She's clearly playing on the obvious sexual implication here. You don't need nudity for it to be sexualized. It's not fake. It's real, deliberate, and overt.

Is Richards trying to imply that sexual jokes are only ok if they come from one gender? Or is she suggesting that every single woman in the world is inherently offended by sexual jokes, and her own jokes are an act of hypocrisy? How would this situation play out if the joke was uttered between two women, or two LGBT people?

Black people CANNOT be racist against White people. Racism is a position of the oppressor who has the power

Or she has horrendously bad dictionary.

This whole leaks of someone who is socially awkward trying to assert her views without actually having to confront anyone directly.

The funniest thing about that quote is that it is itself racist. If you agree that racism is, by definition, holding views, expectations, and/or hostility towards someone based only on their race, then claiming that only white people can be racist is obviously racist.

The hypocrisy and irony in her statement is kind of meta, isn't it? I almost want to think it's some kind of performance art designed to disprove that position... Or maybe it's like one of those buddhist koans, you know? "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" It's so weird and obviously false and bent around, it knocks you into a meditative state?

Yes. That is a tweet. Made by her, in her own name, on her personal Twitter account

The Twitter account she also uses professional, that describes her job title, and that links to her employer. She was representing her company every time she used that Twitter account.

Was she? I normally assume that people's twitter accounts are their own, and that their tweets represent their own opinions/ideas and not those of their employer. Even if their profile does list current employment status.

I would say so. Even if you disclaim that what you're saying isn't your employer's official position, I don't think that means that you're not representing your employer. As far as I can tell, she used her Twitter as an integral part of her job.

Fair enough.I still think there's a difference in that at the conference she, and they, were sent there specifically by their employers, to represent said employers, both of whom were sponsors of the conference, and as such, had an obligation to stand behind the conference, and its code of conduct.

Whereas on her twitter account, she's obviously linked to her employer, yes, but isn't operating under those specific kinds of constraints.

Quote:

Quote:

Like I said, I'm not claiming she handled the situation well.

I don't think it's as simple as not handling it well. Her unwillingness to abide by the standard she holds others to (and that tweet is not the only example) in my mind implies a certain level of disingenuousness. It makes me question her motives. Her blog post feels, to me, like she's protesting too much. Was the "future of programming" (her hyperbole, not mine) really on the line? Did she genuinely believe that to be the case (because honestly, it's extremely hard to see how you get from "dongle joke" to "all programming, for everyone, for ever"). Or was she trying to retroactively justify something that deep down, she realizes was unjustified?

Does it matter?

I don't know what went through her head, I don't know if she's a habitual liar or was chasing her 5 minutes of fame, or if she's just a drama queen or if she believed everything she said. And I don't particularly want to claim to pretend to know her motives, because that seems disingenuous and condescending too.

I don't know what her motives were, and I won't argue that she was honest and genuine and only trying to do the best for everyone, and I think she handled the situation badly, but I don't think any of that invalidates her complaint: those jokes have no place at such a conference.

About the "future of programming" line, yes, that sounded absurd, but I'm guessing she was referring not to "the future of all programming ever", but merely "the next generation of programmers", as in, the children the speaker was talking about. As in, "how are we going to convince this little girl to become a programmer if she won't be able to go to a tech conference without having to deal with inappropriate sexual jokes?"

It's still hyperbole, and I don't think it was particularly clever, but it makes a bit more sense than interpreting it as "the future of all programming ever".

I'm American and thought the same thing. This whole event is 100% culturally driven. People can't be imperfect humans anymore. Any mistake, no matter how minor, can lead to life nuking results because of the level of toxicity in all the competing subcultures. Like her tweet about racism someone posted above- pure mind cancer. It's rampant here, and it's metastasizing more and more aggressively.

exactly, one of the joke I throw every so often (I'm a white guy) is "you're saying this because I'm a woman/I'm black". With this I try to bring a little WTF in the conversation so that people stop and think for themselves

Quiet Desperation wrote:

Where are you located? EU by chance? How would this have gone down there?

But of course I'm french, why do you think I have this outrageous accent ? I can't tell 100% but women would have either laughed, or told more jokes or simply ignored them.I mean, it's like bragging about having bigger feet than you, who cares, unless you think like a child ?Best thing you can do is joke with the jokers, they're probably more fun than people from accounting.We're PROGRAMMERS, remember ?? That used to mean something !

Conferences like this are basically the same as workplaces. If you wouldn't say it in a staff meeting or in your office with the door open, you shouldn't say it at a professional conference. You are representing your company in a public setting.

Whatever her motive was, taking a picture and posting it on Twitter wasn't a professional response either. It seems more like passive-aggression. A better response would, as most agree, to say something to them personally.

But firing anyone over this? That seems like sandblasting soup crackers. Would anyone have been unsatisfied if all involved had just received a stern talking-to from their respective supervisors?

Shame people today just don't have assertiveness anymore. I hope she learned her lesson that overreacting to something that was inherently fairly harmless was the wrong thing to do and a bit of assertiveness could have gone a long way.

I hope these guys learn the lesson that anyone is watching and listening to you, and if you're representing someone other than yourself, especially professionally, you need to be conscious of what you say.

I hope that companies overreacting and dismissing employees because people who have no ties to your business cry about it is the wrong move.

And I hope that everyone else involves learns that doing things far, far worse than any of the above have done is by far the dumbest reaction ever to any of this. I'll never understand how behaving even worse than the behavior you're against is something people think is justified.

Stories like this are why I tend to cast a jaundiced eye towards tech "evangelists"; every one I've ever met (male, female, or otherwise) was a hyper-sensitive, self-aggrandizing, platform-seeking believer in his or her own special brand of bullshit.

That's not to say there isn't a strong undercurrent of sexism and outright misogyny in software (both in industry and academia) - I know there is. I've witnessed it in most of my classes at college and at almost every job I've held, and my wife has experienced it directly. I'm sympathetic to the notion that such behavior needs to be called out, no matter how innocent the offender thinks he or she is being, and halted. Having said that, the adult (and proper) action would have been to directly ask these guys to knock it off (only in more polite language), especially if they were talking during the session (that's rude in and of itself). If that didn't work, then talk to the convention staff and let them deal with it.

Unless Richards has been the target of sexual harassment before, I think her reaction was over the top. Tweeting the picture was uncalled for; her reasoning about the young girl never having "the chance to learn and love programming because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible for her to do so" smacks of self-serving bullshit. I mean, it's okay to be pissed off on your own behalf. And I think that action is what turned this into such a farce. There is simply no reason anyone should have been fired over this. None.

Now, the rape and death threats and DDoS attacks are their own special kind of stupid that call for more, uh, extreme measures. Let your imagination run wild.

Er... I don't know where you work, but at my workplace, we certainly don't have to wear a tuxedo. But we *are* expected to behave reasonably professionally. Which means, for example, that we are expected to create a working environment in which we and our coworkers feel welcome. There's no rule against backpacks, though, and the presence of backpacks does not mean that all other rules have suddenly been cancelled.

Professional dress like professional manners are of varying degrees, generally they are at similar levels. Of course there is nothing enforcing this, but it does work out best that if you are trying to have a certain degree of professional manners, you encourage an appropriate level of dress.

I doubt you and any one of you coworkers would not feel a welcome working environment in pajamas while everyone else was dressed significantly more formally than you. Which would make the unprofessional ones those in formal dress right?

Street clothes may encourage a more welcoming environment( and laid back/informal), but it also encourages less professional manners.

The developer absolutely has grounds to sue Playhaven. He will probably get his job back, or at least get a settlement.

The firing of the developer over what seems to be a relatively slight error made my head spin. I don't know anything of him or this case, but I wonder if it's possible that there had been problems with him before and the company viewed this as a 'final straw' thing.